Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Northern Ireland. Within these areas the Board used the device of industrial
estates, providing the infrastructure for new factories on estates at Cardiff,
Gateshead and Glasgow, and also building the factories for the firms to start up
in, as well as offering loans to firms setting up in the Special Areas. Outside
industry, money was spent on water and sewerage improvements, upgrading and
landscaping of derelict sites, and some urban improvements such as the creation
of parks. In the countryside, smallholdings with their own cottages and
allotments were set up to help poor rural people.
Actual policy in the between-war period could still be regarded as an orthodox
policy, since it sought to help industries into movements where the movement
costs were large. In the event, the policies had little real effect if measured in
terms of industrial growth between the wars. In the southeast in the 1930s,
Greater London received 45 per cent of the employment in new factories, and the
Special Areas less than 5 per cent.
Post-war Britain
Towards the end of the inter-war period, in 1938, the Barlow Commission (its
full name being the Royal Commission on the Geographical Distribution of the
Industrial Population) was appointed to review industrial change, and its report
in 1940 set the scene for the post-war era by arguing that intervention was
needed both to attract industry into the declining regions, and to restrict the
growth of the southeast. This set in place the concept of the “carrot and stick”
approach after 1945, with encouragement to the weaker regions, but restriction
on the more attractive. Barlow argued for an interventionist approach because
markets for labour and capital were not self-balancing, but leading to long-term
and serious imbalance. Much more powerful regional policies were enacted in
the post-war years, from the early 1950s on. On the basis of unemployment
rates, a set of regions was defined that again included the old industrial regions
dominated by mining and nineteenth-century industries, which found themselves
dropping back quickly into depression. War industries were run down and the
leading edge of technology passed them by, moving on to chemicals and
electrical goods, so that these areas found their industries had competitors in
overseas countries (e.g. in steel, shipbuilding, textiles), taking away their
markets.
The measures used included ones both of overt regional policy and indirect
policy. Overt policy included the “stick” policies to move manufacturing
industry out of the southeast. Firms were prohibited from building large factories
(over 10,000 sq. ft. initially, then over 5000 sq. ft, and in 1965 finally 1000 sq.
ft) without a special certificate in the southeast and Midlands, while they were
given considerable inducements in tax concessions, advance factories and low-
cost credits to move to the Development Areas.
On the “carrot” side, the pre-war measures of industrial estates, infrastructure
building and loans to new factory projects were continued, in what were now
